editor's review

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Macpup is a completely free and open source operating system based on the minimalistic Puppy Linux distribution and built around the Enlightenment desktop environment.

Distributed as a minimal dual-arch Live CD

Being based on Puppy Linux, the distribution comes with a small Live CD ISO image of approximately 200MB in size, engineered to run on either 64-bit or 32-bit hardware platforms. You must write the ISO image to a CD disc or burn it onto a USB flash drive in order to boot it from the BIOS of a computer.

Minimal boot prompt

The boot prompt is also quite minimal, designed to allow the user to quickly start the live environment with default boot options or by loading the contents of the ISO image to RAM (system memory), ejecting the bootable medium. Advanced users can easily edit the boot options and add extra kernel parameters.

Beautiful desktop environment powered by Enlightenment

The beautiful desktop environment of Macpup is powered by Enlightenment, which does not look like a Mac OS X graphical session. It is comprised of a single panel/dock located on the bottom edge of the screen.

Bottom line

While the main design goal of this Puppy Linux derivative is to provide users with a Mac OS X-like desktop experience, we have to disappoint our readers since it seems that the Enlightenment desktop environment does not look like a Mac OS X graphical desktop interface. However, it looks very nice the way it is and will run extremely fast on low-end computers.